Keep in mind there are many thousands of members. Because the community here is so helpful, a lot of posts kick in to anyone who says "Help. I've done something silly". But there are nowhere near as many posts saying "Yep, another 3 years where nothing went wrong." In fact, most of the people who feel like writing a post like that get distracted by what's on their stove, and never get around to it. And even if they did write such a post, the only answer would be something like "Uhu".
If you cycle your system properly, take notice of advice from all these helpful people, and are willing to walk all the way into you backyard to your system every now and again to eat something, the rest really takes care of itself.
With a very few exceptions, problems seem to stem from people not following the basic principles, trying to overstock their systems, or overfeeding their fish.
If you want to do it the easy way, don't overlook the people who provide this place, and just buy one of their systems. By all accounts, their stuff just works. http://www.backyardaquaponics.com/shop.html
If you want to tinker and make a home made version, just leave out the fish for 3 months.
Nothing will go wrong. Unless you have a 3 day power outage or your house gets hit by a meteorite. Even then there's a fair chance your system will be the last thing standing.
I know of a person who has never EVER kept a lettuce alive for long enough to eat it until -I-^D they got into aquaponics. Now they eat an organic salad more days than not, from around half a square meter of blue barrel.
My total time spent with the system in the last 3 days has been zero minutes and zero seconds. (Everything is fine regardless of me ignoring it) Any normal 3 days might see me spend perhaps an average of 60 seconds a day in harvest and fish feeding. And another 15 minutes drinking some really nice coffee from my new coffee machine, and sitting watching fish do their thing. Actually I like to watch my plants grow for a while as well, but that could just be me.
If you know a kid, ever have anything to do with one, or have ever been one, you'll also feel the additional advantage of a very difficult thing to quantify or name, but in some way is recognisable as being intrinsically worthwhile.
Get 2 buckets and some hose and make a test system. Then start clearing space for the next system.
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